At the very beginning of the war, many thinkers, myself included, expressed reservations about entering Afghanistan, also known as “The Graveyard of Empires,” because many of us did not believe that a young culture like America had the wisdom to take on a task that would take at least a century to do properly. But we went anyway. Twenty years on, we have played out our initial hand of cards in the first round of a global poker game. We lost. The question is, “What did we learn from it?”

There are eighty years left in the timeline of what we began. We could repeat the mistake of the past. We could start the cycle of death over again, as has been done many times before; not just by us, but by everyone else that’s tried. Or we could find a better way. War didn’t work. It almost never does. Enduring legacies require finding that long path to peace and tranquility. Not an easy thing to do. But not something we haven’t done. //

Today, the conflict isn’t colonial, it’s cultural. Both inside our nation and beyond our borders, the battle between tolerance and fanaticism rages. We’ve learned a hard lesson that money and might don’t work to solve it.

That’s the lesson for America from Afghanistan.